Not a Pro

Well, for a change, everybody is asleep before me. Usually, the sequence is Jean, me, then Renee, who always manages to drag out the evening chores (so I lie awake making sure that she is at least finishing up in a timely fashion). Tonight Renee beat me to bed due to running a sleep deficit. She was so run down that she fell asleep in French today, and had to hitch a ride with me, when normally she would walk home from school.

So here I am, with my new purchase. I've been running Adobe Photoshop CS for years now, and only recently discovered that the upgrade path has been shortened to three versions back. As CS 5 is coming out soon, this means that CS 4 would be discontinued, and I would be forced to either buy CS 5 at full price, or remain on CS forever after. I was waffling on this choice, but Jean said she thought I did enough family photography that the household budget could be used for the purchase. So here we are.

I did a full backup before installing. I was worried that for some reason, CS 4 would not work at all, despite the assurances that my machine/OS met the requirements for the product. With a full, bootable backup, I had a way to go back to CS if CS 4 failed. And as soon as I started, I felt pretty clever for providing an escape route. The reason is that after I invoked CS 4, I tried opening a sample NEF (raw file) from my D70, and as soon as I tried to crop it, the program locked up my machine completely. I had to power cycle the darn thing! I tried variations on this several times, to the same effect.

Finally, I realized that I needed to check the memory usage settings. The default settings try to take about 70% of memory, and do aggressive caching. I cranked these back to something more like my Photoshop CS settings, and after a bit more fiddling, I am now able to use the software on my machine.

So the lesson here is that I am not a professional Photoshop designer. I would need a machine that is newer than four or five years old, with at least twice the memory (more like four times the memory) and a fast offboard hard drive, to let the default settings stand.

Anyway, I've just begun exploring, and honestly I don't think I'll have much to say about it other than to use it. Good for another two product iterations!